“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.

Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.

Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement.

A busy life is a wasted life.

Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don’t know where you’re going. You’re just groping. Then people learn about it afterwards and think how straightforward it was.

Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.

Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don’t be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.

We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

The ‘punch’ of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law – an imaginative escape from palling reality – hence, phenomena rather than persons are the logical ‘heroes.’

Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.